


Endymion's blood

by veeraha



Category: Death Note
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Falling In Love, L has chromesthesia, L pines a lot, M/M, POV First Person, Short One Shot, Unrequited Love, Yotsuba Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 03:20:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4944787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veeraha/pseuds/veeraha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Light may be a murderer, but his voice is the red in L's veins.<br/>This red L knows, will kill him someday soon.<br/>**Dropped**</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Champagne gold

**Author's Note:**

> A drabble that grew out of a daydream. A look at the Yotsuba arc with lawlight tinted lenses, told from L's POV. This is my first work, please leave a comment and enjoy. :)  
> Grammar errors will be corrected as soon as spot them. :\  
> My tumblr: raconteur-incognito.tumblr.com

Somewhere down the corridor a clock was ticking in a hushed staccato, low enough to not be picked up by the ear. Light would not have heard it had he been awake, but his breathing had smoothed out into the pale pink evenness of sleep sometime in the last hour. I tried not to make a sound, sitting as still as possible on the part of the bed his limbs had not already occupied. Polite as he may be when awake, he seems to be a very inconsiderate bed-mate, sprawling out as much as he can and tangling himself in my thousand thread count sheets, my brain supplied automatically. I don’t know why I suddenly remembered that useless trivia. I guess that had to do with the fact that I had not slept in over 29 hours now. Contrary to what others think, I do in fact sleep. I just can’t afford to make it a part of my daily routine.  
I picked the pawn up with my toes and placed it gently on the board, not bothering to use my hands and risk dragging the chain and waking Light up. There is a certain limit to which you can force your mind to split and take on two personalities when you are playing chess with yourself. Today, my opponent happens to be prideful and rash who would do just about anything to win. I already know how this will end. Three more moves and I’ll be in check. I can chose to save myself or let him take my king. The nail on my thumb has worn down to a nub already and I get up without a thought, the chain clattering against the pieces and dragging them down along with it. Bright purple spots danced across the room, merging into the green from the ticking clock.

* * *

 

Light’s wrists are chaffed, skin peeling aside to reveal raw, pink flesh underneath. As he sleeps, his lies, pretenses slip from his face and what remains is what he is within and I cannot look away. When I close my eyes and think about it, all my memories of him are dripping with red. Under the glaring spotlight at the podium in the University auditorium, his auburn hair had glowed with a red haze, the confident timbre of his voice had a strawberry hue to it so absolute, I could almost feel the taste of it at the tip of my tongue. Months ago, after I had waited for hours on the bench, with cherry blossoms raining on me, carried on by the soft breeze, numbers and facts connecting like iron and magnets in my head, his blood red voice had broken my trance and hit me with such sudden intensity that the breath I had held in refused to dissolve in my lungs. That red had a soft melancholy to it, it reminded me of the only other red that I had known, and almost forgotten after so many years. That red tastes of apples and watching the snow falling in lazy circles from the fogged up window of a small apartment back in Winchester. It tastes of mirthful laughter that rang out in swirls of scarlet and brown hair the colour of smooth, dark chocolate. I can speak fluently in 9 languages and can tell you how much honey they put in the crepe from the bistro down in Rue Mouffetard, but I can’t even remember what my own mother looked like. My memory of her is nothing but a permutation of the eyes, noses and lips I had seen in glossy magazines filling in the gaps. My five-year-old self wasn’t the most reliable observer. Perhaps back then, I somehow knew she would not remain around very long, and that is why it didn’t shock me much when she left for work one day and didn’t return home. When I think about it now, I realize that I don’t know where she worked, who her friends were. I didn’t even know her name.

  
Names hold such an all consuming fascination in my mind, probably because there was such a dearth of that in my life. Most of the important faces in my life had carried around names that weren’t their own and even my own name is a mystery to me. Other children my age had names that spoke of the legacy of their kin, or the qualities that they were expected to carry around all their life, whether they could live upto them or not. The novelty of my name was a product of the illegible handwriting of the clerk who had handled my adoption documents. Going by their names, other children in the orphanage could be thought of as ‘brave’ or ‘virtuous’, and I could be nothing, or everything, if you thought of it that way.  
I was given no such burden of expectations to live upto, so I took it upon myself to find a meaning to my name.  
Watari is called Quillish by Roger, and Mr. Wammy by Linda, but to me he is the deepest blue of the sky and the oceans- something that has existed and will always exist. When I was just seven, and crouching with my legs folded like I always do in the back of his car, he didn’t ask me to sit properly like I had expected him to. He knew, without me saying that the colors seem more vivid if I sit this way, and everything seems clearer and I can connect the dots in my head better. One afternoon three years later, I sat across the superintendent at the old headquarters of the London Police in Old Jewry with the same crouch, fifteen eyes glaring at my posture, my hair, my constant nibbling of the thumb. Watari stood behind me like a wall, his form hiding the others from view.  
I didn’t know when my birthday was, or why I should even celebrate such a day. But I grew to associate Watari’s cerulean voice humming out the birthday tune in the foggy haze of the Halloween morning with the especially large strawberry cake he always left at the foot of my bed every year. That year, as I unwrapped his present, a tracking device of his own making, I decided that my name would mean ‘inventor’. The word rang out in indigo swirls in my head.

* * *

 I had been stroking the soft skin at Light’s wrist without even realizing and he’d woken up, regarding me with carefully guarded eyes. He didn’t move his hand away and we lay for what felt like hours, and I could almost forget that I there was every chance that he was the one who had taken the lives of the hundreds and I was supposed to stop him. We are fire and water, matter and anti-matter, order and chaos and we shouldn’t exist side by side without destroying each other but there’s more than just metal around our wrists that is keeping us together now. My sleep-deprived brain was reeling under the utter destruction of all my defenses, the logic upon which I had built the fort inside my mind was lying in smoking ruins and every fleeting touch, every time our eyes met, every shade of red he’d spoken in the last few months came gushing out and flooding my insides with a warmth I couldn’t name. There was a murderer in my bed, and I was inches away from him, staring at his cheekbones and into his eyes, caressing his ruined wrist without any guilt and the way it feels _right_ should be a sin.

Light was the one to break away and the moment crumbled into dust before my eyes, I couldn’t see the shadow of the turmoil I was feeling in my mind be mirrored on his face anymore. His face was lined with exhaustion and something that looked a lot like sadness.  
‘You don’t need to keep watching me even when I’m sleeping Ryuzaki, unless you think it’s possible for me to kill people when I’m unconscious.’  
His back was turned to me and his shoulders were bowed, he was folding into himself, amidst the nest of my sheets, his voice pale and shimmering like moonlight with not a single tint of red.  
The retort about feigning sleep that accumulated in my lips died in my throat and what came out was a small moan. He turned, chains clinking purple in the background.  
‘Tell me what I should do to get you to trust me?’  
There it was again- silver and gold, champagne bubbles against the sunlight, broken glass and moonbeams reflecting of the pool of water at the park in Winchester.

When he had uttered these very words outside the hospital as his father lay in the recovery room, the sincerity in his voice was so genuine, I almost wanted to believe in him. But if I had known then what I know now, I would not have let myself be wavered by the scarlet in his voice. I watched him from behind the glass windows of Watari's Bentley, thinking that it wasn't possible to lie with such unwavering conviction. If that red wasn't a lie, then what should I make of the gold spilling from his lips now.

I had never seen lies so beautiful. I had to close my eyes against it.

‘Ryuzaki? Are you okay?’

His touch was warm against my shoulders.  
‘I’m fine Light-kun. I just have a headache.’  
My lie stained a bright orange against the dark room and I wondered if he could see it on my face. But then, reading lies off each other’s lips are something we have grown used to.  
He resigns and shifts back into bed, knowing that this will probably be the last opportunity to catch up on any sleep in what could be days and he leaves me, gaping, eyes scrunched closed.  
_There is a murderer in my bed, and his voice is made of light._  
I wondered if my name could mean the sun.


	2. Contrapasso

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'Falling in love with fire is a death wish in itself.'

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

\- Emily Bronte, _Wuthering Heights_

* * *

 Light’s face could have been made of marble in the way it rested impassively against the metal frame of the bed. His hands were still bound behind him and I didn’t need eyes behind my head to see Aizawa and Matsuda glare daggers at me. Yagami-san mirrored his son’s posture unconsciously, head bowed against his elbow. At the corner of the screen a thin sheen of sweat shone luminious over Misa’s lips under the glare of the fluorescent bulbs.

The vanilla tasted salty on my fingers and I reached unconsciously into the bowl again.

_What is this new game you’ve begun Light?_

 Matsuda was speaking, possibly to me. But I paid him no more attention than I do usually.

‘Keeping me in here won’t be of any use. I am not Kira.’

My eyes were awash with blue.

Velvet drapes at the chapel, sapphires gleaming against the Swedish princess’ neck, swirls of cobalt blue paint seeping into bowl of water from Linda’s brushes.

‘Ryuzaki, you have to let me go. I’m not the one we’re looking for.’

Another of the veils that had hidden him from me unravels before my eyes and falls to the floor, screaming silently all the way. The tendons in his neck strained against his pale skin. His voice crackled through the speakers in rivulets of indigo and topaz, the color of his father’s baritone, the color of truth.

_Where are you taking me now?_

Two weeks worth of low-lives and delinquents succumb to an unknown wrath while the one we were after sits in shackles in front of me. This isn’t an act. The colors in his voice are real and I trust it even when I don’t want to. But a manhunt isn’t fun when the one you’re after willingly walks himself into the gallows.

_Why are you doing this?_

_Why?_

_Why?_

_Why?_

* * *

 

Watari sits across the table, half hidden behind the 3 tiered cake stand. His newspaper rustles loudly, as if to remind me that he’s not intruding in my space even when he very obviously is. Kira continues to kill and I cannot bear to look at the crushing defeat in Soichiro-san’s proud shoulders as I dash the prospects of his son’s innocence yet again.

‘Why are you not letting him go?’, Watari asks.

Why indeed? I have been asking myself the same question over and over for days. The voices in my head are half-formed faces and their voices are nothing but wisps of smoke. But I can hear what they say loud and clear.

_You want him to be Kira._

_You need him to be Kira._

* * *

 

I was 10 and had two missing teeth when I sat beside Watari in the backseat of the Bentley with my nose pressed against the glass windows, as a group of black-clad Policemen broke down the doors of a three-roomed tenement just outside the city limits in Bangkok. My toes curled against the plush upholstery and right outside, the policemen reappeared dragging three or four children by the scruff of their necks, their reed-thin bodies unwashed, and in various states of nudity and some of them peered through the car and right into my face. Back then, I didn’t even know what the traffickers did to those children and I didn’t find out till I was older and Watari had thought that the knowledge would crush me.

His voice was dark, almost black with regret and he took patted my shoulder, and asked me gently if I wanted to stop this and go back to Winchester, finish school and go to University. He wanted me to forget everything and pretend that no other child will be snatched from their mother’s arms ever again.

‘You don’t need to do this Ryuzaki. It is not your responsibility’, he had stroked my hair.

‘This world is rotten, and those who are making it rotten deserve to die. If I don’t do this Watari, then who will?’

He had never asked that question to me again.

* * *

 

Misa Amane was clinging onto Light’s arm and I could feel the hair rising at the back of my neck. Yagami-san’s voice had no inflection and his lips moved slowly, enunciating each word, delivering a death sentence to two innocent souls with voices the colour of untouched snow, caught in the crossfires of a war that had been raging since the first seed of consciousness dawned on man.

I’ve sat through countless hours of grainy footage of interrogations taken to the third degree that sent able-bodied men scrambling out the darkened room on all fours. I’ve spent hours poring over leather-bound pages that teach you how to twist words and crack even the sturdiest of resolves. I had to do nothing of the sort with Light, all I had to do was wait and he had trapped himself, bound his own wrists and thrown himself at my feet. It felt like slap that sent blood gushing in my ears.

My heartbeat was thrumming in my ears and it could very well be me pointing the gun at Light’s head. Is this what I really want then? To let a piece of heated metal shatter his skull and tear through his brains and quieten that ever puzzling, lying mouth of his. What then?

What would the Prince do after the dragon has been slayed? I wasn’t even sure if he was the dragon, or the damsel that needed saving.

I kept my eyes on Amane, any moment now, she would do what she has been doing all this time and Yagami-san would fall. Then I can lock Light away forever, sew his lips shut so he would never speak with blue and gold silk spilling into my ears.

I was supposed to stop Kira, save lives but here I am, gambling on the life of a man I admired, a man whose life I wished I had.  

Any moment now, and I can finally go back home and sleep and not be haunted by red hair and blue words.

The pen clattered on the floor from Matsuda’s frozen hand as Yagami-san’s gun fired, the sound resonating all around the room.                                                                                       

‘Can you see me Ryuzaki?’

Yagami-san’s breathless voice is closer to jade than the cerulean gleam of all that’s right and virtuous.

The last veil drops and I come undone. The faceless lips in my head keep whispering their ashen chant, as my heartbeat pounds in my ear:.

_You need him to be Kira.._

_You need him..to..be..Kira.._

_You need him.._

_You need him.._

* * *

 

Can you tell when the blackness behind your eyelids bleeds into your dreams?

Light is sleeping beside me, but the room has changed.

Shadows creep oddly around the room.

_Where am I?_

I had never seen this room before, but the dog-eared copy of ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra’ still has the chocolate wrapper stuck inside it marking the page I’d been reading before I had gone to open the door and let Light in.

There are pictures on the wall closest to me. My feet padded oddly across the deep pile carpet.

_Why is this so familiar?_

I was in some of the pictures.

Then why don’t I remember anything?

 I looked younger, there were no shadows under my eyes and I stood up straight. I was standing on a podium, in graduation robes and Watari stood beside me, holding what looked like a diploma.

_My diploma._

_Light had looked so beautiful that day_.

There are certain things whose presence you realize only after they have passed. The realization struck me like waves crashing against a rocky shore.

I love him.

I have loved him since I was 10 years old and he’d stayed up all night beside my hospital bed reading his book when I had broken my leg.

No. He is a murderer and I wish he had never been born. There’s no place for him in this world. He shouldn’t exist.

_I don’t exist._

But I love him and my heart is beating out of my chest. He is sleeping in my bed, and I reach down and take his wrist in my hands. I stroke it and hope the chaffing there isn’t hurting him too much.

But there is no handcuff tying us together now and everything about this is wrong. I stop my caress when my fingers hit cold metal.

There is a thin silver band on his left ring finger. He is engaged.

I’m smiling.

He was so happy. The radiance in his smile hit somewhere right in my heart and he wrapped his arms around me, pulling me closer and burying his face in my neck.

‘Today is the best day of my life’, he had whispered in my ears, his voice ringing like the chime of bells at the chapel.

There is no matching ring on my fingers.

Oh.

‘She said yes!’, his words slurred, and I could taste the sweet sake on his breath.

_I love him and he doesn’t know._

Is this how I repent?

For not getting away from all this when I had the chance? For wading through the dark underbelly of the human condition, dismissing those who were trapped in it and condemning them when it was my own consciousness that was being tainted.

There were people dying, and all I cared about was whether the murderer wore Light’s skin.

He had me by the neck.

No. It was someone who looked like me. Someone with red in his eyes and black in his soul.

‘Lawliet’

Those lips were the untold stories of my childhood, ghosts that I had tried to run from for too long and now I was finally out of breath.

Light slit his throat with a sweep of his fingers as elegant as a violinist coaxing out a harmony from his instrument, and he crumpled at my feet like a puppet with it's strings cut, his blood seeping across the floor and staining my hands.

I didn’t save him back when there was still hope for him and I couldn’t save him now as blood leaked out of his throat in red waves.

Light was cackling loudly and Beyond burst into flames, the skin on his face blackening like parchment held against a candle.

* * *

 

I woke up with Light hovering over me, shaking me gently to snap me out of my nightmare.

His weight is warm against my overheated skin and I slide from under him, bursts of pain erupting around my shoulders.

‘Have some water. You’re throat must be parched.’

His voice is rough with sleep and so _blue_ that it hurts _._

_I must be dying. No. I’m already dead and the bells are ringing loudly today. They will bury me and you will dig your fingers into the fresh earth on my grave and laugh and your laugh is fire._

‘Ryuzaki??’

It’s too much and his hand on my shoulder is keeping me upright but it’s too hot and I’m burning up from the inside.

‘I need sugar. Anything sweet’, I didn’t recognize the broken whisper that came from my parted lips.

‘Hey! Look at me! ’

_I can’t. I can’t. You are a child and you deserve to be saved. But I don’t want to save you. You have taken too much and I can never be the same and you’ll pay for this. This is not justice. This is vengeance._

He pulls me up and holds on to my hand like he doesn’t intend to let it go.

‘We are going to the downstairs. Let’s get you something to eat.’

Beyond’s burning skin was branded into my skull and Light’s ice-blue voice was a salve.

 ‘Don’t get too close to the fire Ryuzaki, you’ll burn yourself.’, Watari had said as he held my head and yanked me away from the fireplace where I had been nodding off against the warmth. I was eleven and back then, I didn’t know exactly how delicious this burn felt. Now, I wanted to wrap myself with the flames and feel the blood bubble up and evaporate from my veins.

There are certain moments whose presence you acknowledge only after they have passed.

But I knew that I was damned from the moment I first let Light’s gaze soak deep into my heart.

This is the repentance for my sins. My heart that reveled in the cold and lonesome was now drowning in warmth and in Light.

I realized that I have never felt more alive in the same moment that I realized I was dying.

Falling in love with fire is a death wish in itself.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up: The events in this chapter prior to L's nightmare happen before the events of the previous chapter. This should correspond with L 'seeing' the color of Light's voice change from red to blue and finally, gold after he gives up ownership of the Death Note. I hope that made sense.  
> Please read, review and share. :)  
> My tumblr: raconteur-incognito.tumblr.com


End file.
